From Cassy's diary
Dear diary, old age is making me more and more prone to look at my past and thoughtfully consider the events until I can see them in a whole new light. A lot of sparse ideas have been wandering around my mind for a while now, and it probably came the time to put some order to them. So here I am, trying to summarise my eventful and messy life.
I and my twin sister Venus were born here in New Sixam about 10 years later than our Declaration of Independence from the Sim Nation. My parents often commented about how much easier life was in here for us sixamians than back in the human town they were born in, yet we have always been very aware of all the sacrifices they had to ensure we wouldn't ever miss anything.
Our parents always followed with great care what was happening in the other nations of this planet and the evolution of their diplomatic relations with New Sixam, and their efforts also allowed us to open the very first diplomatic ties with our neighbour countries. I and Venus always listened carefully to them, and we are also deeply convinced of the importance of what they did.
Yet, we eventually ended up focusing on something much further away and more exotic than our neighbour countries.
Indeed, since a very young age, we have been fascinated by the universe, the other star systems, and by all the emerging technology finally allowing a terrestrial nation to engage in large-scale space exploration.
In short, we knew from very early we wanted to be New Sixam astronauts. And we had to study a lot and work very hard, to achieve this goal.
Our parents were always extremely proud of us and supported our ambition, and I swear dad shed also a tear when we eventually left to attend college. We both majored in astrophysics.
The college years were funny, rough, interesting, energy-draining, and unforgetful as they can be. And it was also there that we met Steve, who later on became Venus's husband and who is still one of my best friends to this day.
As said, a lot really happened when we were in college. After years of hard work we all managed to graduate with honors, and we finally met all the criteria for pursuing the careers we aimed for. I and Venus were hired at the New Sixam exploration centre, while Steve started to work at a company producing experimental robot prototypes.
We were finally all back to our homeplace, in the New Sixam district people still call with the old appellative of Strangerville, ready to start with our adult lives, when really unexpected events started to happen.
It was Venus's and Steve's wedding day, we had just returned back home after yet another very memorable day for us all, when a very old spaceship abducting the groom made it really unforgettable. Later on, we found out the same had happened to a few other inhabitants of New Sixam, causing a state of general alert.
The mystery seemed impossible to solve at first. Those spaceships weren't being used anymore for more than one century at that point, they were extremely obsolete at that point. We took days just to find out that Steve and the others were kept in an old base hidden on the Moon, yet not even my craziest fantasies could have ever imagined the story behind how they had ended there.
We had no way of knowing that a few tens of sixamians remained hibernated for more than two centuries following a series of severe breakdowns in their spaceship, nor that they would have been brought back to life once their propulsion engines would have brought them to the closest destination, which happened to be our satellite. Those people, who we became used to calling ancient sixamians, were different from us for the tendrils covering their heads, for their strong telepathy enabling them to see the thoughts of all those around them, for their customs, and for many other ways we couldn't fully point out yet.
They were born on Sixam when the Earth colonization plan was still in its early phases, all they aimed for was to find a safe place where the future sixamians could live safely for the future being. After seeing what we did here in New Sixam during their hibernation, they humbly asked to be allowed to live here. And there was no way our government could deny them that request.
People were suspicious and annoyed by them, not to say scared. It was normal after their appearance on an old spaceship they used to abduct people, rumour says.
Yet, dad couldn't avoid drawing parallels between that situation and his childhood, nor taking that as a chance to warn us about the importance that our choices would have had from that moment on.
The ancient sixamians had been in town for just a few weeks, yet the attitude of locals towards them was already worrisomely familiar to him.
Our parents still remembered way too well all the discrimination they faced back in the Sim Nation before New Sixam was founded, all because people would focus on their small differences instead of on their striking similarities. And dad tried very hard to make people notice the direction they were taking, he wanted us to avoid repeating the same mistakes he already suffered in the past.
Yet, many people struggled to follow his guidance. Dad didn't live to see it in person, but in a few years ancient sixamians even started to gain derogatory names such as "squid heads", and their reputation always remained very low.
Even Venus and Steve, who always had great respect for dad's teaching, struggled to agree with him this time. "They abducted Steve on our wedding day, how can we trust them!", they always said (and, frankly, it's quite hard to argue back to this very statement).
I was quite the opposite instead.
Back then I didn't give much thought to it but, in retrospect, I think that the choices I took back then really tell a lot about me. I've always had a problem: I get bored very easily, and I constantly need to learn new things. And for me, the differences of the ancient sixamians never seemed something to fear, but rather something to discover. And this could have made me behave a little recklessly.
I wanted to learn more about them, and this is what drew me closer to Toq initially.
The rest of his old crew were extremely reserved and rarely wandered around the town, but he was an exception. I fully realised it later, as with many other things. He has always been way more curious about learning about our world than his comrades, he was quite an outliner within his group just as I was in mine.
We quickly learnt a lot about each other worlds, to the point we started to think to be able to really understand each other. Or so we thought. Only many years later I realised how we had just scratched the surface at that point in time, and how we still had so much more to understand instead.
But we ended up rushing our relationship instead, badly so I would say.
We rushed so much that, just a few months later, I found myself pregnant and Toq, overwhelmed by the revelation, left without much of an explanation.
Only years later he finally managed to explain to me what happened to him at that moment in a way I could understand, telling me about how being overwhelmed by negative emotions resulted in a sensory overload which risked damaging his brain. I didn't know their stronger telepathy could have this drawback, as many other things.
In my ignorance, at that moment I felt as stupid as I never did before.
I've always praised myself for being an intelligent person, until that moment I never had a reason to doubt it. Yet, I had been so damnably naive in that case. I realised in the worst way possible how little I really knew about Toq and relationships in general, and at that point all I could do was face the consequences.
Eventually I decided to keep that baby. Back then this choice obliged me to face many difficult moments, dealing with pregnancy and childcare as a single parent, yet now all those memories are overshadowed by the awareness that, without those moments, Sirio wouldn't be with me now.
I don't know how I would have done if Venus and Steve didn't decide to continue living with me, to help me all along. I mean, I guess I would have found a way somehow, but they undoubtedly made it so much easier for both me and Sirio. I'm so grateful to them for this, and sometimes I feel a bit sorry because I'm also aware I've never managed to return them this favour.
In the following couple of years, the situation at home had been quite chaotic. And I'm not only referring to the chaos caused by little Sirio, but also to his little cousin, Halley, who is about one year younger.
Our family was by no means a traditional one, yet we were finally managing to find our equilibrium between work, family, and even a bit of free time.
But everything changed again, when Toq showed up.
I really didn't know how to react. On the one hand, there was no way I could forget the way his absence hurt both me and Sirio. Yet, I had so many questions as well. And Sirio seemed to have his own, as well. In brief, my curiosity won again.
At least, that time he allowed me to read his mind, so that I could find the answers I was looking for by myself.
The second thing I realised is how difficult it was for him to learn about the New Sixam's customs. I wasn't the only one shamefully ignorant about the other the moment we split, it took him much longer to learn about our people and how to integrate among us.
Then, finally, the last thing I understood was how foreign the concept of family was to him. He never had a mother or a father figure in his life, and he had no clue about how to be a parent. Yet, he seemed to want to spend time with Sirio, to know him better.
Eventually, I decided to allow Toq to make a return in our lives. The memories of the past years were impossible to forget, but at least made me learn a lesson. For this reason this time I took this relationship very slowly, evaluating every single choice with extreme care.
Sirio indeed immediately benefited from his dad's presence. He always seemed so happy around him, and he learnt quite a lot from him. Sirio's telepathy is not as strong as Toq's, yet he has always been able to clearly perceive emotions from others. He was slowly learning that, with most people, he had to pretend not to perceive anything at all, but for him it was refreshing to spend time with someone more similar to him, as Toq was.
In short, I was very happy about the relationship Sirio and Toq were slowly improving. What left me doubtful for a very long time was the new evolution of the relationship I and Toq were rebuilding instead.
This time it took years, I took all the time I needed to learn as much as I could about how to communicate with him effectively, about his past, the person he is, and about the reasons why he took those decisions in the past. And, eventually, we fell in love yet another time.
I had a lot of time to think about this outcome at this point. In insight, both I and Toq are quite the oddballs in the places we come from, and we would have found the other interesting no matter what. If we had faced our relationship with the same maturity we only demonstrated later in our adulthood probably everything would have been easier, yet I'm so glad we finally managed to come to understand each other.
And so our family became even weirder, some people even started to point at us with curiosity along the way. And I haven't mentioned Techna yet either, the robot prototype Steve was working on in those years and that quickly became like a member of the family.
We were slowly managing to reach a new equilibrium, when new matters intertwined with our astronauts jobs slowly emerged on the horizon.
The job I and Venus do at the space exploration centre is mostly aimed at the retrievement of rare elements from celestial bodies such as planets, satellites and asteroids. New Sixam is a great country in many ways, but it is shamefully poor in many elements we need for the advancement of our technology, first and foremost lithium for batteries. Yet, even after years of research, we weren't able to locate any good source for this element.
It was only after many unsuccessful attempts that we started to realise that might have been the wrong approach. With some lateral thinking, we actually realised that a quite good source of lithium could have been right in front of us during any mission on Sixam, as the star around which that planet orbits seems to be full of that element and many others. How could we reach it, though?
This question became even more urgent when Arizhel, another ancient sixamian we met a long time ago, decided to make a public announcement to the whole New Sixam population.
Let's say Arizhel has never been very popular in New Sixam. Among all the ancient sixamians, she's the one who retained the most the rigorous and rational mindset she was taught on Sixam, and it was with her old moral values that she made that speech. She pointed at the inevitability of climate change, and the necessity to find another planet to colonize in order to ensure the prosperity of the future generations of sixamians.
So that neither our government nor our population wanted to help her, she eventually decided to move on Sixam to organize her own action plan, with the help of the few ancient sixamians who decided to reconstruct their old crew. To succeed in her mission they would have needed the same resources we were looking for, and so we suddenly became rivals.
I wouldn't have managed to elaborate a solution, if it wasn't for the sense of urgency given by suddenly having an opponent to play against. It was so easy, we could simply use the teleport machines to move matter directly from the core of the Sixam's star to New Sixam, and retrieve elements and energy as a result!
And we eventually also managed to convince Arizhel to abandon her plan and return back to New Sixam to join her forces with us. Even if we wouldn't have been able to succeed if it wasn't for her family. It was quite a shock also to us at first, but she indeed has a family too, not that different from ours, actually.
And so we had yet another reminder about the importance of not judging a book by its cover. Arizhel seemed a cold and heartless person at first sight, yet she had been doing what she thought to be in the best interest of all the sixamians all along.
This is why she decided to look for a new planet when she had proof of the concrete possibilities for a climatic disaster severing the ability to sustain life on planet Earth within a few centuries, to surround herself with people with the best training for the mission, and to erase the memories of Edwards and Florian so that they wouldn't miss her too much.
After being put in front of new data though, the ones obtained by running an updated simulation including the energy output of the new prototype of plant fueled by the Sixam's star I ideated, even she was convinced that this could be a more feasible alternative than colonizing a new planet, after all.
Soon after she returned back and started again to collaborate with us. She actually is a quite smart person as well, I really believe we could get a couple of other good ideas before retiring, if we worked together.
And so here we are, my dear diary, to my present.
My curiosity really sent me through a rollercoaster-like life, making me pass from some real highs, but also some horrible lows. Could I avoid the worst parts? Maybe, but then the chain of events of my life wouldn't have brought all the good moments I remember with so much care. I wouldn't say I have any real regret, and I'm only looking forward to spending a calm old age together with the people I care the most about.
I don't think my diary will be as interesting anymore from now on. I'm not even sure who I'm writing this for, but I also firmly believe that Sirio's diary will surely become more and more interesting over time instead, whatever path he'll take I'm sure he'll be doing great!
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